::A Geek in Korea::

My wife and I went to visit her family today. Her bother is in town, and everyone was home for the holidays. There are a lot of rules I’m still figuring out when I visit. When her father came home, I had to stand up and greet him. I can sit down when he does, but not before. If he’s sitting down, I can’t lay down. basically, the game is always being one step behind in comfort from the patriarch. Never eat before he does, always use polite words. Never criticize directly. It’s that subtle game Koreans play that let people know how they want you to act without ever telling you.

The hard part of my visit today was when everyone else was working. Her brother was in the shower, my wife was folding clothes, and my mother in law was cooking a delicious meal. I’m not allowed to help. My father in law was peeling garlic cloves. He had a 20 liter bag full of raw garlic from the market. He would cut them up and peel off the garlic skin. I was sitting not far away watching television. Pretty soon my eyes were watering up. The stench was overpowering, but he was peeling away unaffected. I have no idea how he wasn’t vomiting over the stench. It was like mild tear gas.

My wife and I both couldn’t complain, it’s not our place, and we’re supposed to somehow learn to enjoy the aroma. Had it been her brother, we could have annoyed him until he stopped, or at least told him to open a window. We decided to go for a walk and purchase some fruit at an outside market to get some fresh air. All the markets radically inflate prices for this week, since people purchase gifts for their family on the Lunar New Year’s holiday. We ended up going to a small corner store and purchasing a small box for a reasonable price before returning. We should have purchased it before arriving, as visiting a house without a gift is bad manners, but the fruit everywhere else was much too expensive.

We returned shortly thereafter. Her father went to purchase more garlic and I quickly went over to the window to vent the foul air in the apartment. By this time, the meal was nearly finished, so got ready to eat. When her father returned, and everyone was seated, we had to wait for him to go to pick up his chopsticks before we could eat. After that, I had to keep to myself while other people did dishes or cleaned. I feel rotten as a guest that is never allowed to raise a finger.

I made only one faux pas that I got criticized for. I forgot that there rules specific to her parent’s house about placing shoes. The space near the door is tiny, but you must line up shoes so they do not face out. This is for luck. People that point their shoes out towards the door are eager to leave. Shoes point only into the apartment, arranged in rows for space. I took off my shoes and didn’t arrange them neatly. This is a pet peeve of my father in law, so he complained when he came back before lunch. This is the sort of nagging, the "No one things of these things" errors I have been getting used to that everyone else in the family already knows. I get pretty much a free pass, but over the course of a few hours I hear a few things that always manage to break my spirits.

It’s exhausting, trying to correct myself constantly when all I want to do is lay around and chat.

One of my classes was asking me some personal questions. They think their English is much better than it really is, so they have a bit of an attitude problem at times. One of the things they asked me was how many countries I had visited.

 

Not only was Valentine’s day this week, but the Sunday marks Lunar New Year. This means that Saturday, Sunday, and Monday are national holidays. I don’t work on Saturday or Sunday, so this is one of the worst Lunar New Year holidays ever! Children love getting money from their relatives and eating rice cake soup, but all I want is a few days off work from time to time. The week heading up to Lunar New Year is filled with anticipation. What will the gift set be this time?

Last year, for Chuseok, the other long traditional Korean holiday, I was given a good sized box of individually packaged kim which we ate through in a surprisingly short time period. This was the first time in a period of close to 4 years I hadn’t gotten a "Dove Set". A "Dove Set" consists of Dove shampoo, toothpaste, some body wash, and other various soaps and toiletries of various quantities. While at the time I thought that I wasn’t going to need a large box of sea weed, it actually was an excellent gift. Much better than the soap I usually got.

It turns out that I have a skin condition brought on by Dove shampoo that makes my scalp extra sensitive. My "new" stylist told me that whatever shampoo I used, I needed to change to a brand better suited for my skin type. He told me that while Dove shampoo smelled good, it wasn’t good for foreigner’s hair. Now I use a better quality shampoo and my wife tries to finish off what’s left of the Dove we have from previous gift boxes. We never usually buy shampoo, since getting a set from school used to be as predictable as clockwork.

This year, I got a spongecake for Lunar New Year from my school. It’s cool, because it’s not something I expected, it will get eaten over the holiday, and I don’t have to carry something heavy and impractical home that I won’t use or need. This makes my school two for two on excellent holiday gifts. If they could actually give us some time off to enjoy the holidays, that’d be even better.

My wife was asking her boss what their school was going to get for Lunar New Year. She hates Dove sets as much as I do, but she gets them every year and simply "regifts" them to her mother. Her director came into the school and asked, "Hey, what gifts would you like? Tuna Set? Sesame Seed Oil set? Dove set?"

"How about a fruit box?" she replied. We can always finish off fruit in our household.

"Nah, I already ordered the soap. Dove set it is!" was the reply. Why did he go ask in the first place and give her hope?!

I still keep in touch with several of my good friends from college. They are all somewhat geeky people, so our primary means of communication, outside of blogging, is via instant messaging services. I, being the person least likely to communicate by other means, has been running GAIM or a multiclient chat program for several years. The problem is that my friends all demand to use one particular client or another. I’ve got screen names on nearly every service under GAIM, and I use each service to talk to only one or two of my friends. If GAIM didn’t support chatting with many services at once, I’d be stuck running three or four messengers if I wanted to talk to all of my friends at any one time.

I’ve slowly started getting my friends to use interoperable services to spare the amount of copying and pasting I need to do between friends that are chatting with me at the same time, but have to way to talk to each other due to their clients not working together. Due to snow storms in the United States, they had days off work. (So lucky!)

Since they weren’t at work, where most of their chatting transpires (productivity, thy fate is doomed), my friends lacked their complete list of contacts. This means I was going back and forth between them, cutting and pasting conversations between them. Ironically, most of the conversations today were about trying to get their different clients working together.

A: "What’s his screen name again?"
Me: "What’s your screen name?"
B: "Oh, my screen name is this, what’s his?"
Me: "Here is his screen name, what is yours."
And so on…

Other than chatting about not being able to chat with each other, and the snowy weather, not much got accomplished, but I was tremendously busy relaying messages across the globe to keep my friends in touch.

I’ve thought of solutions. Why don’t I use IRC to create a channel we could all use to talk together? I took me 6 years to get these guys chatting regularly on simple, relatively easy to use IM programs. While some of them are tech savvy enough to use the internet and blog, something like Internet Relay Chat isn’t going to happen any time soon. I count myself lucky that I can now call them from Skype and forgo the entire chat fiasco if I so chose. They’d be content with emails if I didn’t hassle them constantly to be online for someone to entertain me after work. We are all codependent time wasters.

This morning I got up early and watched an English language weather report on Arirang TV. There wasn’t any intention on my part to watch a news cast from Korea, about Korea in English, but I happened to catch their prediction for the weather today: Rain in the afternoon, with a chance of snow (in Northern areas), and the first warning of yellow sand from China that I’ve heard this year.

Since yellow sand makes me sound like a two pack a day smoker after a hard day of classes if I have to walk outside, their prediction stuck in my mind. I passed on my warning to my wife, who packed her umbrella just in case the other part of the prediction about rain became true. I forgot my umbrella at work, so I only needed sunshine until I arrived to escape the rain.

When my coworker and I went outside at 5:30 to go to dinner, it had yet to begin raining. My coworker was only grabbing a quick snack, while I was going for a sit down meal. We both laughed about the weather prediction, as the sky showed no sign of changing from overcast to rain. When I found out I would be eating alone, I actually returned to school, grabbed a book, and headed back out to the restaurant. I left my umbrella behind at my desk, as it appeared I wouldn’t be needing it.

As soon as I ordered food into the restaurant, I noticed people running around with umbrellas or seeking shelter. Not only did it begin to rain, but it was actually a fairly heavy downpour seemingly out of nowhere. Of course the weather would change after I mocked the forecast and had left the office without my umbrella. Damn karmic justice. I had a nice little jog back to the office through the rain after my meal. At least the yellow sand, if it was in the air, didn’t bother my throat yet, but if I wake up raspy and hoarse, I’ll know their revenge was complete.

My wife and I made plans yesterday to visit her father. He’s currently home alone, as my mother in law is in the Middle East for vacation. There are carefully established rules and customs guarding what happens when you visit your family’s house. Luckily for me, as a man married into a Korean family, the extent of my obligations when visiting involve "watching television" and "consumption of food and or alcohol". While I might get to sit around when we visit relatives, my wife has to work, even as a guest in her parent’s home.

This was an semi-unannounced visit. He had called us and invited me to climb another mountain, but we had declined. Implicit somewhere in this invitation was, "Hey, I’m bored, come over and visit." We stopped by a supermarket to pick up something to drink for her father before we arrived in the morning. We got some juice and milk, but typically you would bring alcohol when visiting, depending on the time of day and the person. We arrived shortly after noon to catch our father in law relaxing and watching television.

I was told to plop down and watch television with dad. My wife got to the casual conversation, and started washing the dishes. Her father told her he would do the dishes, but made no effort to stop her. I suggested she sit down and join us, but she said she had an obligation to do housework now that she was in her parent’s home. Her mother said when she was little to always help around relatives’ houses.

She went around doing the various chores her mother would have done if she was around. She folded laundry, cleaned a table, and cleaned up her messy brother’s room. All while her father and I sat around. I wasn’t allowed to help, and I also wasn’t allowed to tell her to stop. It was rather awkward.

Eventually her father told us he wanted to take a nap. We took this as a sign, so after she finished removing lint from a sweater, we got ready to go. Before we left, my wife left an envelop with some pocket money for her father. It’s customary for sons and daughters to give parents money to help them pay bills and to ease the cost of living. The most likely reason her father was sitting around the house was that he didn’t have the cash to go out and do something.

We gave him some money, and the only thing we took were two apples. We didn’t have any, and fruit prices are rising due to Lunar New Year being next weekend. Even with swiping some fruit while he was sleeping, that’s still a good deal for him. He got money, juice, and a cleaner house, and all we got were two apples. I’ll never be comfortable sitting around watching my wife work while she is a guest.

When you purchase a dog, you expect to train it. You need to teach it to sit, to wait, to go to the bathroom in the right places. Little do you expect that the dog will train you as well. Yoshi has actually been training me since he took up residence in the computer room for the winter.

Yoshi still uses the water bottle we bought for him when he was a little tiny puppy. Now he can hold a lot more water, so we usually fill it at least once a day. The bottle hangs on his cage, which is located under my desk in the computer room. This means that when I am writing, Yoshi will occasionally come into the computer room and drink some water.

When there is no water in his bottle, he knows what to do. He just sits at his bottle and keeps trying to drink. He’s not being dumb or stubborn. He’ll give me a look that says, "I’m empty. Fill this bottle already."

There is a ball mechanism that blocks the water that goes to the mouth piece. When it is empty, the ball is noisy as he tries to draw water, so I hear him and I realize he needs water. I rarely notice this on my own. Yoshi knows that if he wants water, all he has to do is be noisy when I am at the computer and I’ll refill his bottle for him. It’s pretty cool, because I rarely think to check is bottle every day unless I am at the computer.

Now I have concrete evidence that I have in fact been in Korea a remarkably long time. Way back in this post, five years to this very day, was when I started calling and referring to one of the downtown video game store owners as "shady". I thought he was very sketchy with his business practices when he sold someone a modified Playstation 2 capable of playing illegal copies. At the time, however, he was the only person selling what we wanted in the entire city, so we tolerated this.

After getting burned by him a few times, I declared I would never shop at his store again, even in a moment of complete boredom and weakness when downtown. Eventually the smug man that ripped me off was replaced by extremely smug evil looking young men that were even less likely to get my business. The service went from "condescending and rude" to simply "rude and intolerable". I started shopping at stores nearby, going to Seoul, or shopping online at a premium to avoid paying this guy money for games I wanted. He was one of the few people I really had a grudge with. I made sure that anyone asking me for places to buy games never went there.

Eventually when I would go downtown I would give a stare over to his side of the techno mall. Not many other people seemed to be stopping there either. Perhaps word got around that he liked to sell pirated stuff and that the owners were rude people that offered no service after the sale.

The last time I went downtown, I noticed the store had been completely ripped out and there was simply blank space in its place. Success! I had won! The bastard went out of business, or moved, before I ever spent money with him again. The victory was hard fought, and took a long time, but I came out victorious in the end.

Things probably won’t come to this again. I have a store by my old apartment and current job that will import for me, sells legit copies of games, and has a friendly staff. No longer to I need to suffer the ride downtown to be looked down on by rude store owners.

It only took five years, which is a remarkable time in small business in South Korea. My wife’s falling out with a local knitting school and supply shop only lasted as long as the current mild winter had her making wool items. The school closed when it started trying to charge knitters for lessons after the coldest days of the year had past. She just wanted to knit a sweater for our dog to look cute, and now they are going out of business. Watch out, we are a couple that will make or break a store’s success by our very act of shopping there. Beware our wrath.

Today was my last day to renew my marriage visa before it expired. Usually we are exceedingly punctual and very careful about immigration issues, because I like living in Korea and would like to continue to do so with minimal legal hassles. Yesterday I printed off some paperwork from the Internet from the immigration office to fill out to save time. Both myself and my wife would need to be present at the office, so we needed to get it done quickly before work.

It’s always good to be prepared with all the requirements before going to the office. Upon printing off the paper, we noticed there was a spot for a photo. It’s common for documents submitted to the government for immigration, and resumes to request a picture be attached. I had used my last passport sized pictures some time ago, so this morning I needed to get some more taken. I went to a local studio located in an apartment complex and had my picture taken. He asked me for my name, and told me to come back two hours later. I said, "Oh no, I need these now."

He said, "Oh, okay, wait ten minutes." He printed them off right away, and I headed back to our apartment. I have no idea why he wanted me to wait in the first place. As soon as I got home, my wife was ready. She was literally walking out the door as I arrived back with the pictures that had been printed off. We ran off to the taxi together. She had brought the paperwork with her, so I assumed she had prepared all the other remaining documents as well, whatever they might have been.

We got to the immigration office and started filling out the paperwork. Then I get to "passport number" and realize I don’t have a clue. It’s only at this point where we both figure out no one had brought the passport. Crap. We both gave each other dark stares, and pondered our next course of action. If we both went back to the apartment, she would be late for work. If I went there alone, she couldn’t file the paperwork. Would they let us file without some of the information? We asked the information desk, and they suggested we try and see what might happen.

The immigration office has gone through a radical transformation in recent years. It used to be a dark, dingy place that gave off the aura of a principals room in an old high school. There were rooms where people would go in and never expect to return. Now, it’s like a nice, clean bank. You walk in, take a number, and watch television as you wait. The process is streamlined into windows and there are actual signs in languages people can read telling you where to go and what to do. It’s very refreshing in what was once a very stressful environment.

We, however, were sweating bullets. No telling what would happen with out less than complete documentation and lack of a passport. Would we be sent back to the house to pick up the passport? Would I get in trouble for being late for filing my extension?

Our immigration officer was a very nice short lady. She took out paperwork and understood about us forgetting the passport at home. Turned out we didn’t actually need it, as I had my foreigner card and all the information is linked. I’m in their system so they know what I’m up to and who I am. Our apartment move was noted in their machine as well. The woman behind the counter did a double take when she noted our old address. It turns out, she is the owner of the apartment we used to live in! My last school rented that apartment from her, and one time we had gotten a call from her when she had thought about renting the apartment to another individual. What an odd coincidence!

It might have been because our story checked out, or because of the coincidence, but we didn’t need to do anything other than fill out the paperwork we had already finished to extend my stay. They wrote another year on my foreigner card, and I’m still a legal resident. Oddly enough, according to the woman who processed our work, only the application of the wedding visa requires excessive paperwork, such as the sponsor proving legal employment and whatnot. Now that we have the visa, it’s much easier to keep it. In fact, both my wife and I could be unemployed and I’d still be a legal resident! I can now officially leech off the Korean lifestyle! (Knock on wood. I hope that this will never, ever happen.)

It was nice to get caught up and cement my legal status for one more year.